My Sunday Feeling

North Little Rock, Arkansas is basically a small town. It has always been proud of its discreet and insular ways. However, big things have been happening in old Argenta ( its original name). Alltel Arena was built over there 10 years ago. The old Main Street is now hopping with trendy restaurants and new office space. And 2 years ago Dickey-Stephens field, a state-of-the-art minor league park was opened for business, thereby stealing the Arkansas Travelers from Little Rock. They had only played here since the 20s.

Nope, no two ways about it NLR has a lot going on and can justifiably thumb its nose-metaphorically speaking-at its sister city south of the Arkansas River. But sometimes the folks over there forget that, small town though it might be, North Little Rock is attached to the State's largest media market. And it is not as easy to keep things quiet over there as it once was.

Case in point: A man got killed on Main Street over there Saturday night. Street person known to the cops as "Ace." He had been savagely beaten and was barely alive when he was found. He was transported to a local hospital where he later died from his injuries.

The police saw a bloody hand print on the front door of a nearby apartment. They called the resident on the phone and asked him to step out. Inside the apartment there was a bloody baseball bat in plain view of the officers. Inside, they found bloody clothes in the washer and boots caked with what the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette referred to as "blood and human tissue." And with the grim discovery of those items of evidence, Donald Grace was arrested and charged withe the first degree murder of the man known as "Ace."

The District Judge over there is a man named Jim Hamilton. Nice guy. Devout Roman Catholic. Member of the Knights of Columbus. He has been plugged into North Little Rock politics forever. He presided over the Plea and Arraignment of Donald Grace. According to the account in the newspaper, he heard testimony from Grace's lawyer brother and his law partner that they would check on him practically on an hourly basis. He would be easy to monitor. His apartment is located over his brother's law office.

Based on this testimony Judge Hamilton assigned a bond of $25,000 and home detention although he waived the typical requirement of electronic monitoring.

$25,000 for 1st degree murder.

When interviewed by the newspaper, Judge Hamilton said something along the lines of "Well, there's not much doubt that the defendant is going to appear. That's the reason you assign bail in the first place."

And there is something to that. There is no cookie cutter "one size fits all" approach to these things. And there is not much doubt that Grace is going to show up for his trial or any pre-trial hearings. I know his brothers. To the extent that you can control another human, they will make sure he will show.

But a judge friend of mine who has since quit hearing criminal matters once told me his philosophy on bail and sentencing over lunch a couple of years ago.

" I do my best to be pretty consistent. I do it so that the lawyers will have a pretty good idea on the front end about what I am likely to do. It helps the prosecutor in offering a plea bargain. It helps the defense lawyer tell his client what he is looking at penalty wise. I think the system works better if all the players have an idea on the front end of what to expect out of the guy on the bench."

Do you think Grace's lawyer advised him that he was looking at basically getting ROR'd given the severity of the charge? That all he was looking at having to pony up was $2,500 getting charged with beating a man to death on Main Street Argenta with all of those brand new businesses attracting all of that foot traffic? Like me. Who unknowingly parked my car at just about the spot where they found "Ace" the other night while meeting a friend for dinner.

Not very likely. Do you think the average guy under similar circumstances would catch such a light bail? Equally unlikely.

Am I suggesting special treatment of this defendant because his brother is a lawyer over there? No. I am willing to accept that the judge didn't feel the need to put a high bond on Grace as he didn't feel he was a flight risk. But there are a couple of problems with this to my thinking.

In the first place, you have to be a special person to be charged with murder in the first degree. Anybody sufficiently sociopathic to even get charged with that would have to be considered somewhat unstable and therefore a flight risk. Or at least more of one than a purse snatcher. Secondly, it isn't fair to the other defendants, who show up in court with their families, only to get a high bail on a similar charge. It isn't fair to the guy cooling his jets in the County Jail because he wasn't able to come up wasn't able to cough up the 10% to get the bondsman to throw his bail. And it for damn sure isn't fair to Ace who died a horrible death.

I hope for the sake of the family that there is some reasonable explanation for all of this although it sure doesn't look good for Donnie. But even though I feel for the family, there's no way you can justify that bond given the offense. Like my friend the judge says, the system works better if folks have an idea of what they can expect on the front end.

Who knows what to expect now over in District Court in North Little Rock?